Rent control battle in California heats up, opposing investors pump money
Al Jazeera
Developers opposed to repeal of Costa-Hawkins Act have raised more than $116m in California.
Reyna Aguilar was working as a chef in a restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission neighbourhood when the COVID pandemic struck. The restaurant shut within months, leaving Aguilar worrying about how she would make rent on the studio apartment she had lived in for nearly a decade.
When the government announced it would give rent vouchers, Aguilar, who wears her hair in a loose knot, felt relieved. But her landlord asked for cash instead.
Worried she would lose the home it had taken her a few years to find after she moved to the United States from Mexico to earn money to be able to pay for the education of her five children whom she had left behind, Aquilar contacted Catholic charities for rent vouchers. But the landlord would not accept those either.
Instead, she told Al Jazeera that the landlords’ employees stood in the building hallway, shouting insults and making it hard for her to pass through to her apartment.
At first, she slept with a stick, afraid they would break in and of the rats that scurried around her apartment. When she felt the landlords’ employees looking through the broken keyhole in her apartment door at night, Aguilar stopped sleeping. By November 2021, fear and sleeplessness got to her, and she moved out.
